Delay in page loading can be a real deal-breaker. Even a single second delay in page load time can contribute to:
- 7% drop in conversion rates
- 40% surge in page abandonment
- 11% less page views
Just a few additional seconds can hugely impact the performance of your website, eventually affecting user engagement and sales. Even Google and other search engines penalise a site that loads at snail’s speed. Needless to say, this can put a halt on your brand’s success story.
That’s the reason why it’s essential to take proactive steps to improve the page loading time to ensure you get relevant traffic and subsequent sales growth.
Here are a few small but significant changes to reduce the page loading time:
1. Give up the Sliders on Homepage
The beautiful sliding animations in the banner is not only alluring to watch, but a smart way to put several points on a single page. Perhaps, that’s why it is one of the most common features on a homepage. There’s no doubt that all the animations and effects make the site attractive, but it can heavily compromise the speed. The sliders are nothing but a bunch of layers, scripts and plugins. Apparently, such complicated coding can severely influence the performance of the page, increasing the loading time. Instead of the sliders, you can use a compelling image, with catchy headline and intuitive call-to-action.
2. Use Search Engines Optimised Images
A web page loaded with tons of images and other content often exceed the prescribed 100KB size limit. This makes the entire website bulky and slow to download. Eventually, the loading time shoots up!
This problem can be solved with just one small thing - You can speed up the download time by compressing images. There are numerous tools online which enables you to adjust the size of your image and save valuable space, thus improving the load time.
3. Fix and Repair all the Broken Links
Broken links not only drain the bandwidth, but they give a very strong reason for the user to leave the site. It is seen that fixing the broken or bad links, all the 404 errors pages can positively affect your site’s overall performance. There are several tools like Google Webmaster that can help you spot and identify broken links. Fixing such links can bring a sustainable decrease in the bounce rate, improving the site’s chances to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
4. Putting CSS at Top and JS at Bottom is the Key
Many web developers regard putting the CSS files as close to the top of the page as possible, as browsers will not render the page before they load the CSS file. Similarly, JS should be placed as close to the bottom as possible, as they prevent the browser from parsing.
Roping in professionals from a leading and experienced website development company in Sydney will help you get a robust web solution.
